“It’s hard to believe it wasn’t built to look that way,” Alice said, turning her back on the Forum. “Listen, Marshall, I want you to write to them about that furnace. I refuse to spend another winter like the last one.”

The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of a hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is.

Ever since I was a kid reading Terry and the Pirates I’ve always dug uniforms. I dug football uniforms, the clash of team colors against each other, and the heavy German uniforms in World War II movies; I dug braid and insignia, Ike jackets were very cool and air force blues. Whenever I drew a picture in school it was of an air force pilot in smart blues with wings and ribbons.

1. A wall. Once, the wall was white; now it's an ugly yellow... the color of dried urine, old newspaper or faded hopes-and-longings. (Brings to mind the principle that beauty is unstable: while 

My father used to say about my mother that she read so many books, he could hear pages turning inside her when she lay down beside him at night.

Who knows what goes on in their heads? said Jocasta. They were well into the second carafe of wine. Not me, I’ve stopped even trying. It used to be women that were so mysterious, remember? Well, not any more, now it’s men.

Neither of them knew what “carte blanche” meant, but if, during the Spanish Civil War, someone had bothered to explain it to them, they would both have replied in unison: “That’s us! That’s 

These are the last things, she wrote. One by one they disappear and never come back. I can tell you of the ones I have seen, of the ones that are no more, but I doubt there will be time.

Living at Number Sixteen Evelyn Mews, Tilda often thought, was like living in a poem. Number Sixteen was a townhouse of bright whitewashed brick with black shutters and a glossy black roof.

The waters swept the East Coast from Maine to Florida. Hourly broadcasts informed us that land was breaking off at an alarming rate. In some places the coastline had regressed to the Appalachians